Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  When Bascal next spoke, his voice was resignedly unhappy, and cold. Xmary could hear him giving up, letting go. “Not deep enough, my dear. Not nearly deep enough.”

  This was Brenda's one chance to make it better, to apologize and smooth things over. Bascal paused long enough to make the chance unambiguous, but she didn't take him up on it. Sighing, he stood, straightened his collar, and headed for the stairs.

  Xmary and Conrad shared a look, and then Conrad and Robert, and then Robert and Xmary. Everyone was looking at everyone, except Brenda, who looked down at the ray-streaked wellstone of the deck until a seemly interval had gone by and she could, with dignity, slip away herself.

  That night, and for days afterward, Xmary hardly spoke to Conrad at all—hardly dared to—but touched and hugged him every chance she got. She met his gaze; she smiled warmly. She clung. If he was not her flotation device, her air supply, her anchor against the winds of fortune, he was something not far removed from that. Something vital.

  And so she asked herself: Will I stay with him when we've unpacked and debarked? For a thousand years? Ten thousand, a million? I could live without him. I have lived without him, and the odds are virtually certain, in an infinite universe, that I will again. But God help me, I can't imagine it.

  To the best of her knowledge, Bascal and Brenda were never intimate again, and when Xmary asked him about it, years later, all he said was, “Dear girl, human beings weren't meant to love forever. Indeed, I fear sometimes that we weren't meant to love at all.”

  chapter seven

  starfall

  Technically speaking, the pressure of Barnard's light on the photosail had begun to slow Newhope in the year 92, when its light finally became brighter than Sol's. In practice, though, this effect was negligible until year 98, when Newhope was well inside the Oort cloud; and it was quite minor until the very end of year 100, when they were finally inside the orbit of Gatewood, the outermost gas giant, some thirty-six light-minutes from the star itself.

  Of course, there were no launching lasers—or rather, braking lasers—here at Barnard, and while a number of complex schemes had been floated before their departure, involving lasers shining away from Sol, bouncing off the sail in funny ways to brake it here at Barnard, the mission planners had finally decided on the simplest of solutions: carrying lots and lots of deutrelium for a really hard deceleration burn.

  So Newhope screamed into the system at .06C—eighteen thousand kps—running tail-first with the fusion motors burning at medium power, supplementing the nav lasers in their effort to vaporize any debris in their path. Flitting—in a single crew shift!—past the orbits of giants Gatewood and Van de Kamp, the nearly hospitable Planet Two and the barren rock of Planet One. Disappointingly, only the latter was in a position to be seen clearly, and that for only a fraction of a second. By this time the braking effect of the light sail was not negligible, not even minor, but then, neither was the gravitational attraction of Barnard. The two balanced each other that first shift, and then on the second shift the braking effects began to dominate, began to slow Newhope's travel measurably, though still not nearly enough. The fusion motors still provided twenty times more braking than the sail, and then as the ship approached perihelion—or peribarnardion, as Robert insisted on calling it—the deutrelium valves were opened all the way, the throttle set at maximum, and in the safe cocoon of the ertial shields, Newhope decelerated at almost two hundred gravities.

  The view through filtered portholes and simulated windows was staggering. Barnard was smaller than Sol, with a weaker surface gravity, and though its temperature was lower, and its energy output a lot lower, its surface was markedly more active: a riot of flares and sunspots and coronal anomalies. The space around it was lively with proton storms, prompting Robert to remark, “Eighty percent of our hull mass is given over to radiation shielding right now, and we're still getting an unhealthy dose. Even our clippers and frigates, when we build them, will need battleship plating in this system, or the crews will be down with cancer in no time.”

  “Even our orbital colonies will need to be shielded,” Bascal added. “P2's trifling magnetic field isn't much of a defense. You have to remember how close it is to the star, snuggled right up against its meager warmth, only forty-five light-seconds away. We're lucky the atmosphere is so thick, or we'd die of radiation sickness right out on the surface.”

  After that, some more dramatic words were spoken and recorded for posterity, but Conrad never did remember what they were, and never heard them played back or spoken of again.

  And then, with alarming swiftness, Barnard was shrinking behind them. Or ahead of them, if you wanted to think in Newhope-centric terms, for the bow of the ship would remain pointed at Barnard for the foreseeable future, until orbital capture was complete.

  “Information, can we have a graph of deutrelium consumption over time?” Conrad asked.

  “Deutrelium consumption is constant,” Agnes protested.

  Indeed, as Money Izolo had told Conrad many times, the flow rates were very tightly controlled for a given throttle setting, to minimize damaging thermal anomalies in the reactor. “Snaps,” he called them.

  Conrad sighed. “Deutrelium stores, I mean. Give me a graph of the deutrelium level in the tanks. And talk to engineering: find out how much of our supply has decayed over the course of the journey. The stuff has a half-life, right?”

  “It has two half-lives,” Robert said. “One for the deuterium and one for the helium-three.”

  Conrad rolled his eyes. “My, isn't everyone a stickler today. Your precision is commendable, Robert, and my own lack of it an embarrassment to us all.”

  “Just give him what he wants,” Xmary cut in with an authoritative voice. By now, everyone knew you didn't quibble with Xmary. You could disagree with her, bring her serious issues, even take the initiative to accomplish necessary things without asking her first. But any sort of nitpicking, any splitting of hairs or academic nose tweaking, and you would bring out the old party girl in her: judgmental, hypercritical, and impatient of needless posturing. “Don't be such a leak,” she had said to Agnes more than once, right here on the bridge. And to Robert: “Don't speak to me again until you've ingested a drug, mister. I don't care which one.” And to Conrad: “Plan on just shutting up for a while, all right? There's a plan for you.”

  Bad enough if she said these things in command tones, but she generally managed to make them funny, which was worse. For the most serious cases she reserved the Ugly Hat, a punishment so lame and undignified that no one had risked it in decades. The Ugly Hat was a full meter tall, and composed of equal parts feather and sequin and madly flickering wellstone, like a blitterstaff that had spent the weekend in Gamboll City.

  So without further comment, Conrad's requested graph appeared on the ceiling half a minute later.

  “Engineering,” Conrad called down after that, “time to deutrelium depletion?”

  “At current rates of consumption, sir?” Money returned.

  “Obviously at current rates of consumption.”

  “Because we want to leave some reserve in the tanks. Safety margins, yah? And inevitably there's ullage as well, the fraction we can't easily extract from the tanks and plumbing.”

  “Money, not now,” Xmary warned. “Just tell us what we need to know.” He accepted the warning, and conferred for a few minutes with Robert in hushed intercom voices, and then went off by himself for a few minutes before coming back to the comm window and relating to Conrad that the burn was expected to last another eighteen hours, and that four tons of deutrelium—less than one percent of the original supply—would remain in usable form when they were done. They would need that fuel for in-system maneuvering, for transit to P2, for all the things that Newhope would be called upon to do once they had finally come to a halt. And since Newhope was the only transportation they had, at least for now, it would be called upon to do a great deal.

  So the burn thundered on, barely felt in th
e ertially shielded and gravity-lasered confines of the crew quarters, terminating just as they passed the orbit of Gatewood on their way back out again. Newhope continued upward, not back toward Sol but in a direction only slightly bent from their original approach vector. Barnard's gravity was on their side, now, and though its light pressure was behind them, pressing on the sail and technically speeding them up, the tack on the sail (actually a dancing chorus of clear and silver patches, as the sail itself was immobile) allowed them to absorb the force in a lateral direction. This amounted to a minor deceleration, on the order of ten microgee.

  “Now comes the frustrating part,” Xmary said to her bridge crew. “We go where we must, and not where we really want to.”

  Strictly speaking, they had arrived. They had captured into Barnard orbit. But their orbit was cometary; they wouldn't reach aphelion—apoapsis, apobarnardian, whatever you wanted to call it: the high point of their orbit—for another ten years. They could, of course, burn up their remaining fuel and stop more or less dead, but this would be dangerous in the extreme, and wouldn't really help in the long run, because they'd need the sails to maneuver their way back to Planet Two anyway. And that would actually take longer. Instead, they would make a complete circuit around the star—a tight cometary ellipse, shedding speed all the while through the slow, steady push of the sail—and brake once more at the bottom. Twenty-two years from now.

  “Back into storage?” Robert asked with a groan.

  “You especially,” Xmary agreed. “I don't need two more decades of boredom and frustration building up in my astrogation team just when we're finally doing something tricky.”

  Robert would have looked about as thrilled if she'd asked him to put on the Ugly Hat. But he nodded, and later that shift, Conrad personally escorted him to the fax machine at the forward inventory. “I just want to be there already,” Robert said to him as he stood by the print plate. “I want to run a position check and find that we've been there all along, that all this was a bad dream.”

  Conrad could only shrug. “People used to say life was a journey, not a destination. My mother still says that, or anyway she did a hundred years ago. I'm not sure it's true anymore; people live forever and never seem to go much of anywhere. But we're different, Robert, or we ought to be. Once we're finished decelerating, we still have to unpack and make our way to the planet itself. And then we've got orbital colonies to set up, and then the first ground colonies, and then industry, and then agriculture and maybe even terraforming if we have the stomach for it. And the whole thing is going to take us hundreds of years even if we hustle, which I'm not sure we particularly need to. And even when we're finished with all of that, this place will never be like the Queendom. That's the whole point, isn't it? So why are you impatient? What, exactly, are you waiting for?”

  Robert stared at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Paver's Boy, in subjective time I'm almost thirty years older than you.”

  “Your choice,” Conrad said, shrugging. “I'd've spent even more time in storage if I thought I could get away with it.”

  Robert waved a hand, impatient with that reply. “No, you're right. You're the one with the proper attitude, the immorbid attitude. And knowing you as I do, I can't for the life of me think where this wisdom of yours has come from. I've always believed in anarchy, in ad-hocracy and collectively half-assed solutions to the problems of life, but suddenly you make me wonder. Could it be that simply holding a position of authority—even petty authority—wakes up a little piece of us that knows how to lead? That knows what's right and proper. I've got my eye on you, young man. I'll be studying this.”

  Then he turned and stepped and vanished through the fax's print plate.

  The irony of it, of course, was that Conrad himself was burning with impatience. “Pretends,” he told the empty air. “The part that pretends to know what's right. Blue Robert, you nudist pirate chieftain, you know as well as I do: leadership is the art of lying.”

  And yet . . .

  It should be said that immorbid people gripe about time in much the same manner that Old Moderns once did about the distance of a telephone call or the altitude of an aircraft: with great conviction and very little practical consequence. Consider it a form of boasting, perhaps, or a vestige of the hunter-gatherer wiring which remained, in spite of everything, permanently baffled by the marvels of technology. In any case, for the vast majority of Newhope's crew, the time passed in no time at all.

  Barnard's meager supply of asteroids—mostly the cosmic equivalent of coal—were nothing to write home about. Newhope did write home, of course, because the Queendom astronomers were squirming with curiosity, and were owed a favor or two for all the information they'd transmitted ahead to Newhope. But there were no minor terrestrial planets in these belts, nothing big enough that its own gravity would pull it into a spherical shape, as with Ceres in Sol system. In fact, only four asteroids were larger than two hundred kilometers across—all residents of the more populous inner belt, between the orbits of Van de Kamp and P2. These worldlets were egg-shaped and very dark, and Bascal, struggling for a name worthy of the journey that had brought him here, dubbed them the Four Horsemen: Bellum, Fames, Obitus, and Morbus.

  The outer belt consisted mainly of rubble: irregular, sharp-edged chunks of carbonaceous chondrite and low-yield iron ore no more than a few kilometers wide. The total mass of the two belts together came to less than a tenth of Sol's own Asteroid Belt. Fortunately, in an energy sense, the outer belt was the easier one for them to get to, requiring less than half the fuel they'd need to reach the inner one.

  So that was where Robert and Bertram steered them: to the outer belt, which they insisted on calling the Lutui Belt. Whether this was meant as a compliment to King Bascal or some sort of subtle dig in the ribs was neither clear nor specified. Nor asked, for that matter.

  Newhope's first orbit carried her high up into the Oort cloud, but Barnard provided some fairly significant braking on the second pass, which dipped down into the upper reaches of the star's chromosphere, or middle atmosphere. How the ship—120 years old by now—rattled and groaned between her ertial shields! How she whined at the inconvenience, and sweated through the scorching heat! But she saw them through, riding the particle flux and magnetic disturbances as though she were born for them. Which of course, she was.

  The density of the chromosphere was not all that much—about equivalent to the “vacuum” in low orbit above the Earth. But plowing through a quarter-million kilometers of it raised a substantial cumulative drag, shaving hundreds of kps off their speed. And then, of course, there were the photobraking effects from the pressure of Barnard's light on the sail. This was also significant, shaving off another fifty kps, which was enough—just barely—to lower their apogee down into the upper reaches of the Lutui Belt.

  This process took a lot of attention and a few more years of their precious youth. This time, more people were needed outside of storage, although the shifts and duty periods were by no means evenly distributed. The old grew older while the young remained as they were. At the start of the journey the crew's oldest member was just seventeen and a half years older than the youngest, but now—even discounting Bascal himself, and the stored passengers whose subjective experience of the journey was zero—that gap had widened by decades. Conrad learned an astrogation term to describe this: dispersion.

  “Throw a handful of rocks on the floor,” Second Astrogation Officer Bertram Wang explained one day over beer and blintzes in the observation lounge, “and they'll skid to a halt at various distances: some at your feet, some coming to rest against a far obstacle. Most of them are just scattered in between, in a pattern we call ‘Gaussian distribution.' If we draw a graph of crew subjective ages—a histogram, it's called—I'll bet it follows this pattern. A bell curve, you know, with Bascal at one extreme, the median peak around twenty-seven years or so and, I dunno, Martin Liss at the tail end. Remember Martin?”

  Indeed, Conrad remembered
him well. Had even gotten him killed once, when Martin suffocated in a makeshift space suit during one of the more hazardous operations of the Children's Revolt. He was technically the ship's medical officer, but the job was so redundant that he'd been pulled out of storage only twice over the entire course of the journey. “Yeah. All right, let's try your graph.”

  They did, and it came out much as Bert had predicted it would.

  “But these aren't random events,” Conrad objected. “These are people with free will, making conscious choices. Pebbles that get up and walk around.”

  “Yeah, well,” Bert replied with a shrug. “Choices are a stochastic phenomenon. Meaning you can apply statistics to them, which I'd call a fortunate thing, or else there would be no science of politics at all. Everyone would just—I dunno—guess what to do and hope it all worked out.”

  Conrad laughed at that. “You're saying they don't?”

  “Not always, no. If our dear king is clever as well as cracked, he'll keep some people around to check the math on his various plots and schemes.”

  And here a prejudice showed through: implicit in any discussion of aging on Newhope was the observation that along with the alleged “seasoning,” it fostered a particular kind of craziness, which Xmary dubbed “decade fever.” At the far, peculiar end of the spectrum was King Bascal, yes, now 145 years old, with more than half that time spent in the company of two persons or fewer.

  “I wouldn't talk like that too openly,” Conrad warned Bertram. “But you're not the only one worrying about it.”

  Bascal, speaking to Conrad on an occasion some nine months later, was upbeat and expansive on the subject. “Ah, my old friend, or rather my young friend, my childhood chum who still has baby fat around the cheeks! There is so much more to life than you've yet guessed. It is such a rich and intricate process, of which you've tasted so little!”